Fifth-Graders are Wild About Wikis!
by Jane Williams, Grade 5 Reading Teacher

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Dorothea Lange’s iconic photo of a migrant
peapicker and her children taken in California
in 1936.

Wikis? The Great Depression? Hoovervilles? Baby Face Nelson?

Just a few weeks ago, these terms would have had our fifth-grade reading students scratching their heads! But thanks to Christopher Paul Curtis’s Newbery Award-winning novel, Bud, Not Buddy, Jane Williams’s fifth-grade reading classes jumped into a technology-based research project to write “wikis” about these and other topics found in the book.

Bud, Not Buddy is set in Michigan during 1936 and tells the story of an orphan who sets out on his own to find his father, whom Bud Caldwell believes to be a famous jazz musician. The adventures and people Bud meets along this journey bring many events and people of the 1930s to light through the main character. From “riding the rails,” to spending time in a Hooverville in Flint, Michigan, and then hanging out in a jazz club, the fifth-graders experienced what life was like for an African-American boy during the Great Depression.

Upon completion of the book, the fifth graders set off to the technology lab to research some of the people and events they had read about in Bud, Not Buddy. With the guidance of MS technology teacher Karen Polstra, the students learned how to conduct an online search and collected research on their topic from a variety of sources. Then they began putting together their wiki.

So what exactly is a wiki? A wiki is a special type of website that allows users to easily create, edit, and link web pages together. It is an ideal collaborative tool because the information is created and edited online. The best known wiki is Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, which contains information created by a collaboration of millions of people from all over the world.

Students Enjoyed the Challenge of Creating a Wiki
The added element of the wiki project sparked the students’ interest in a period of time many knew nothing about. Maggie Hamberis said it best when she admitted, “I really enjoyed the Bud, Not Buddy wiki project because it taught me more about the Great Depression by letting me put it into my own words. . . . I had no earthly clue about the Great Depression.” Bobby Hudson and Van Boyett, who collaborated together, said, “We enjoyed the Bud, Not Buddy project. It was fun researching the Great Depression. We learned so much and thought it was cool to be on the Internet.”

Said student Jack Schofield, “I really liked doing the wiki project because it makes you feel like you are important, like you could do anything. It was a real challenge creating it because something was always wrong, but the final product gave me a special feeling.” Elizabeth-Ann Sherbert is particularly proud of her work: “I enjoyed making the wiki because when we finished it, it didn’t just go in the closet at home. The entire world can see it on the Internet.”

To access the students’ wonderful wikis, simply go to
http://bud-not-buddy.wikispaces.com